Way to go, Elon!

Seriously. Good on him. 4th attempt and he's succeeded in getting a payload (albeit a dummy one) in orbit for a fraction of the cost of the long-established "big guys" (whom you would have though would have worked out ways of bringing the cost down by now, being experienced and all).

Frankly, his batting average is far in excess of anything NASA or the Soviets have acheived (I well remember archive footage of Goddard and friends fleeing some of their early experiments in just getting a small rocket to go straight up!)

@ Matthew

'Is there any new technology involved or this just news because it is privately funded?'

No technological breakthroughs, but new designs for engines and pumps. This is the first time a rocket has been designed by a private company without huge injections of government money, so that's new.

It will be significant if they can design a reusable liquid-fuelled first stage. These have been really troublesome because they need lots of delicate turbo-pumps and miles of plumbing which can be easily damaged when they come back to Earth. NASA scrapped reusable boosters on the Shuttle in favour of simpler, more robust SRBs - and we know how that ended up. The Soviet Union developed reusable boosters for its Energia monster rocket, but I don't think they ever got reused after the two Energia launches.

So if they can get their technology to work, they'll be able to rival the cheap Soyuz system and the Chinese Long March - which will please Western satellite companies looking to put loads into orbit without paying through the nose and without giving away their technology. Arianespace could be the big loser here as they currently only have the big Ariane V rocket. They're planning on offering Soyuz launches out of French Guyana in the near future - getting the Earth's spin to give that some extra kick compared to launching from Kazakhstan; but they're also building a small solid-fuelled booster called Vega which is due next year.